They looked like generic vitamins or allergy medicine, something ordinary.

Laurie Halse Anderson -- The Impossible Knife of Memory

It’s one of the generic pictures that gets sold along with the picture frame, a shiny, happy advertisement for all the shiny, happy moments you can capture forever inside the 5" x 7" sterling silver frame with butterfly detail.

Lauren Oliver -- Before I Fall

The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would—and did—detest.

Gillian Flynn -- Gone Girl

Sort of generic directions.

Rick Yancey -- The Infinite Sea

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Maybe a generic ….

Dave Eggers -- The Circle

After extracting a few context— free specifics about the movie from her, I set to work writing an incredibly generic three-page paper about the Industrial Revolution.

Piper Kerman -- Orange Is the New Black

I realize, probably too late, that I wish to leave something of myself, a small service to Bedley Run, and not simply a respectable headstone, but after seeing the generic, forlorn closedness of the store, I feel precipitously insubstantial behind the wheel, like an apparition who has visited too long.

Chang-rae Lee -- A Gesture Life

They say if we call ahead and bring a doctor’s prescription, they can even get any generic drugs that we might need, so that there is no chance of us running out."

Jojo Moyes -- Me Before You

There’s a generic resemblance, that’s all.

Margaret Atwood -- Cat’s Eye

The wall-to-wall bookshelves were now filled with academic but generic-looking hardcovers, all bound in neutral colors with gold lettering.

Becca Fitzpatrick -- Hush, Hush

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Sunny shrieked, in a generic cry of frustration, and pounded her little fist on the floor.

Lemony Snicket -- The Reptile Room

The walls glowed with a warm, dull haze of opulence, a generic mellowness of antiquity; but then it all broke apart into clarity and color and pure Northern light, portraits, interiors, still lifes, some tiny, others majestic: ladies with husbands, ladies with lapdogs, lonely beauties in embroidered gowns and splendid, solitary merchants in jewels and furs.

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

It was a fairly generic place, one of those two-level faux brick and aluminum siding buildings with exterior doors that all look identical except for their shiny gold numbers.

John Corey Whaley -- Nogin

The smaller boys were known now by the generic title of "littluns."

William Golding -- Lord of the Flies

Such details escape him now, and his descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story.

Khaled Hosseini -- And The Mountains Echoed

"It was sort of a generic word to describe someone who was slow," I said.

Rebecca Skloot -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Pretty generic, Tally.

Scott Westerfeld -- Uglies

The only generic hospital garb sitting around are those embarrassing gowns that they put the patients in.

Gayle Forman -- If I Stay

I will call people by different names or generic names because I don’t want you to find me.

Stephen Chbosky -- The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

Or did he just order a generic god?

Rick Riordan -- The Red Pyramid

His face was generically human to me, but the knowledge in my memory applied the wordkind.

Stephenie Meyer -- The Host

She wasn’t really his aunt, of course —just one of the old women in the community, a generic tia who helped watch the kids.

Rick Riordan -- The Lost Hero

You think I should kill my baby and replace it with some generic substitute?

Stephenie Meyer -- Breaking Dawn

Was that a promise? A generic blow-off? I watched him motor off, then started for home.

Ellen Hopkins -- Burned

Or he could use a generic, vague spell to block whatever Oromis was doing.

Christopher Paolini -- Eldest

Peter reached for his commissary form again and checked off the box for a generic greeting card.

Jodi Picoult -- Nineteen Minutes

Even when he felt the need to say something, he usually volunteered only the most generic comments typical of armchair psychologists.

Nicholas Sparks -- The Last Song

Instead of realistic facial portraits, the mummies had the generic wide-eyed, smiling faces I’d seen on most Egyptian death masks.

Rick Riordan -- The Throne of Fire

What he called his wife, once; maybe still does, but really it’s a generic term.

Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid’s Tale

This profound generic view of the female sex did not seem to dispose Haley particularly to the straight road, and he announced decidedly that he should go the other, and asked Sam when they should come to it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Instead I drove the streets of Lenoir, passing through the retail district, complete with the assorted collection of fast-food restaurants, and began to slow the car only when I reached the less generic part of town.

Nicholas Sparks -- Dear John

These men who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

I passed on my "get well soon" to Phil, and promised to call her with every single detail from Forks High’s generic graduation.

Stephenie Meyer -- Eclipse

Neither the sister nor our young hero has a name, so his situation is made slightly generic, which is useful.

Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor

A tall, light-skinned man with generic good looks, Jones was quick to learn that Cedric is a star student.

Ron Suskind -- A Hope in the Unseen

An empty room, Gervais had said, and at first I tried to picture white walls, a wood floor, a generic anywhere.

Sarah Dessen -- Lock and Key

His generic sneakers had made it all the way back, but they were full of holes and stank.

Tracy Kidder -- Strength in What Remains

But Parry replied that the epithet is ornamental, being used of the earth also in The Odyssey (11.301), and need have no special connotation here.25 The problem for translators, then, is to know whether a given word is being used for effect and when it is more generic.

Homer -- The Iliad

His basket held generic food and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling.

Don DeLillo -- White Noise

These I don’t have any generic name for…"hangups" I suppose.

Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"Kennedys" was the generic name for stuff like that.

Tracy Kidder -- Mountains Beyond Mountains

It was under a counter, staring horror-stricken at a bowl of generic dog food.

James Patterson -- School’s Out - Forever

In a private box above Saratoga Race Course on August 3, 1936, Marcela and Charles Howard surveyed a field of generic $6,000 claimers.

Laura Hillenbrand -- Seabiscuit

He knows that deshi, a generic word for "countryman," means "Indian," knows that his parents and all their friends always refer to India simply as desh.

Jhumpa Lahiri -- The Namesake

For although the mother confused their names or called them all by the generic pet name, "Cuquita," and switched their birthdates and their careers, and sometimes forgot which husband or boyfriend went with which daughter, she had a favorite story she liked to tell about each one as a way of celebrating that daughter on special occasions.

Julia Alvarez -- How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

I thought he said this: "The generic word for ’brother’ is brother."

Pat Conroy -- The Lords of Discipline

When I was a teenager, I watched it shudder and gasp and finally begin to die, the pines clear-cut into huge patches of muddy wasteland and the character of the little towns murdered by generic subdivisions and generic fast-food restaurants.

Rick Bragg -- All Over but the Shoutin’

It was a man’s tenor voice, a very pleasant, generic voice — the kind of voice that you heard in the background of luxury car commercials.

Stephenie Meyer -- Twilight

The party was made up of what Mrs. Trenor called "poky people"—her generic name for persons who did not play bridge—and, it being her habit to group all such obstructionists in one class, she usually invited them together, regardless of their other characteristics.